Giving up the ghost: a memoir

✍ Scribed by Hilary Mantel

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers;Fourth Estate
• Year: 2010;2013
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 222 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o'clock and she is getting the cabbage on. 'Hello, Our Ilary,' she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn't stretch to the 'H'.Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's wry, shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family.It opens in 1995 with 'A Second Home', in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of childhood. 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' begins in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: 'Two of my relatives have died by fire.' Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early...